Thanks for your thoughts via the blog post

My interest is in the Promoting Positive Activities agenda – in terms of getting information about Places to Go, Things to Do out to young people.

Now, for a while we have been talking about the notion of “fish where the fish are” in terms of being able to distribute/disseminate/syndicate such content out into the spaces and places where people might actual be – ie: social networks!

I suppose the opposite to this is to build a website and then think that all young people will know about it and/or visit it.

Somewhere between these two is a middle ground though!

I am interested in your comments on social networks (potentially) being seen as a private space for young people, where those with youth work ideas/messages may not be welcome. What about those with info on stuff to do? Or how to get money to do stuff?

Granted , there is a fine line between this and promotional/commercial messages, which we have to tread very carefully

All food for thought – keep up the blogging!

Great to see you back blogging and interesting comments too. I’m over in West Sussex and having similar discussions with colleagues. This is a developing area for us.

Good luck with the blogging and great to expand the community again!

Of all of them it was our own hosted network that had the most success – I think largely because young people made a conscious decision to visit the site and went there with the intent to find out/think about volunteering and stuff related to us etc.

We moved to facebook thinking that it would be more convenient for people ie. they’re already using it so it will be straightforward enough for them to quickly check up on the group, reply to messages & so on. What I think actually happened is that we became just another group in a very long list of groups that people belong to. I did make it clear to members that we were trialling the use of facebook and feedback was welcome – the feedback that I got wasn’t negative but it did suggest that our facebook presence was politely tolerated rather than warmly welcomed. This is contrast to my personal facebook where I get many ‘friend requests’ from young people we’ve worked with – however I reject these unless I know them to be over 18 and I actually do regard them as friends ie. only the young people I’ve known for some years and most often ones I’m no longer directly working with.

What is certain is that the level of engagement from young people in the facebook group was much much lower than it ever was on our own network – I don’t have any feedback about why this was the case but I suspect it was in part because it wasn’t actually our space and so people didn’t feel the same sense of belonging and wanting to contribute that they had previously had.

A final point back to the notion of ‘invading private space’ – it is also worth keeping in mind that most social networks are not the domain of young people alone – they’re shared spaces and just like in real world communities there maybe needs to be consideration to breaking down generation gaps (albeit while respecting the priciple of voluntary engagement)

lol sorry to post such a long comment on your return to blogging! Glad to see somebody focussing on these issues though.